The Nadir: Racial Divide and the Black Women's Club Movement
By the end of the 1880s, well-known Black suffragists start to fade from mainstream leadership records. Terborg-Penn suggests the possible reasons:
- White leadership no longer needed support from Black suffragists the way they did in the early years, so they stopped recruiting
- Black women understood the differences in political priorities between white and African American suffragists, so they saw fewer reasons to associate with white-led suffragist organizations
- A combination of 1 and 2 triggered by a growing racial divide in the U.S. that prompted separate political directions between the races
What is clear is that Black women suffragists were acquiring increasing levels of political awareness grounded in their intersecting identities As individuals, we are made up of many overlapping social identities, such as race, gender, class, (dis)ability, sexuality, etc. The study of the way these identities intersect and relate to systems of oppression is known as intersectionality as African Americans and as women.
During this “formative period” in the 1870s and 1880s, they straddled mainstream suffrage activities and Black-led local and national-level organizing. The second would continue to expand into the 1890s.